Force-feeding power
By BOB ENGLISH
Thursday, January 26, 2006 Page G16
Three decades ago, Chevrolet's Corvette, which has been working its charms on car enthusiasts since its arrival in the early 1950s, captured the fancy of two Vancouver brothers who still have examples of the breed in their garages.
Jim Boden, who now makes his home in Toronto, bought his first in 1973, an L82 coupe, followed it up with another one in 1979 and a third in 1985. But he currently owns something very special, a sinister black 1988
Callaway Twin Turbo convertible.
His brother Larry still lives in Vancouver and owns a pristine, show-winning 1960 convertible, which he's had for more than 30 years, and a 1963 Z06 split-window coupe.
The latter was the first year the high-performance Z06 option package, created by Corvette's legendary boss Zora Arkus Duntov, was offered. The Z06 was reprised in 2000 and again in the fantastic new 2006 Z06.
Larry, who has been a quadriplegic since a car accident a couple of decades ago, hasn't let his injury affect his enthusiasm for the iconic American sports car. "He's an interesting guy," says his admiring brother. "He never let it get him down."
A locksmith by trade Larry, designed a number of high-tech features into his home and collects art while still enthusiastically looking after his Corvettes. He can't work on the cars himself, but enlists friends and his wife to help and has become an expert at sourcing parts. His 1960 has been featured in magazines and calendars and he and the car are regulars at car shows.
Jim Boden began his career working with what is now the Canadian Iimperial Bank of Commerce in Vancouver, arrived in Toronto in the early 1960s to learn about computers and was settled there permanently by the end of the decade. He moved up the IT ranks to assistant vice-president before leaving the company in 1993.
Since then he's been involved in a number of ventures, worked as an IT consultant/project manager and currently makes his living from his home near the old Greenwood racetrack as a day trader.
His interest in the ultra-high-performance
Callaway Twin Turbo was sparked by articles in the buff books of the day. "I was determined I was going to get one, but
you couldn't buy one in Canada, they were only offered by about 20 car dealers in the U.S."
Since the arrival of the new millennium, horsepower, in mega-amounts, has become as commonly available as it was during the height of the muscle-car era of the sixties, but for much of the three decades in between that wasn't the case.
It took the auto industry most of the seventies and eighties to figure out how to combine high output with high efficiency in terms of tailpipe emissions and, to a lesser degree, fuel economy.
Even cars like the Corvette went from the 465-hp monsters of the early seventies to the anemic 165-hp versions of a few years later. By the time a new generation of Corvettes arrived in 1983 (as 1984 models) output had climbed to only a little over 200 hp.
To provide a performance image-enhancing boost for Corvette, General Motors did something unusual -- it sought help outside the factory gates, in this case from one Reeves Callaway, who'd made a name for himself by force-feeding engines with turbochargers.
Callaway had been a promising racing driver in the early seventies with an SCCA Formula Vee championship to his credit and, after a stint as an instructor at the Bob Bondurant performance driving school, began to employ his engineering talents finding ways to boost the output of production cars. His first efforts, with a turbocharged BMW 320i, led to national magazine exposure and enough orders to launch a business.
The cars he developed for GM and which are known as
Callaway Twin Turbo Corvettes were made available as a regular production option (RPOB2K) and more than 500 were built between 1987 and 1991. Among them was one very special version, the 880-hp Callaway SledgeHammer, which ran almost 410 km/h on Ohio's Transportation Research Track.
Still keen on the idea of acquiring one of these hot cars, Boden called Callaway and discovered the company offered a retail conversion that would turn a new stock car into a Callaway Twin Turbo.
Boden found and purchased his 1988 Corvette from a dealer in Belleville with 800 km on the odometer and took it to Callaway's home base in Old Lyme, Conn., for the conversion.
This involved hauling out the stock motor and replacing it with a balanced and blueprinted 5.7-litre V-8 that retained the stock cam, but a lower 7.5:1 compression ratio to work with the pair of oil- and water-cooled Rotomaster turbochargers, with adjustable waste gates and a pair of intercoolers fed by an under-hood tunnel.
Other bits and pieces include an adjustable computer control for the extra fuel injectors, a Bosch high-output fuel pump, an oversized radiator, Z51 brakes, Borg Warner T-10 four-speed overdrive transmission, an oil cooler and a boost gauge.
Dymag magnesium wheels with Callaway centres, various Callaway logos on a variety of other items and a special plaque for the dash completed the conversion process.
Boden recalls the car costing about $50,000 to buy and the conversion almost $40,000 by the time it was legally reinstated in Canada.
The engine now produced 382 hp and 562 lb-ft of torque and had the right stuff to match performance figures that include a top speed of about 290 km/h and a 0-100 km/h time in the under-five-second range.
A performance driving school at Shannonville some years ago gave him a taste of its potential, but Boden's put only 42,000 km fairly restrained street miles on it since 1988, which likely accounts for him still having a driver's licence.
globeauto@globeandmail.com
SOURCE -
The Globe and Mail, Canada's National Newspaper
B2K Clone in Canada
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but it still would not be in the records as a real car. In addition to the VIN #, all the Twin Turbo cars have a serial plate by Callaway - this unique plate has the year and car number on it and was affixed to the dash.
Those are fighting words. 
I can quote Reeves Callaway as saying when asked his thought on this, "They are all B2K cars." 
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